The Pathfinder Office desktop is shown below. The three default windows are Map, Feature Properties and Time Line (more on these later). The first thing to do when preparing for GPS work is to create a PROJECT. A project is a set of folders where your GPS files are stored and organized.

 
  Figure 1. The Pathfinder Office Desktop.

To create a new project, select File|Projects|New and the Project Folders window opens.

  Figure 2. The Projects Folders Window.

Type in your project name - "Campus Map" is used as an example here. By default, the Comment is the current date, the Project Folder is c:\Pfdata and the "backup", "export" and "base" folders are automatically created. For many purposes, these defaults are satisfactory, but if you wish to change them you may do so here (for example, you may wish to save your folders on another drive or give your "backup", "export" and "base" folders other names). Your project must also have a coordinate system, datum, geoid model and altitude units (for example, in Figure 1 above, the coordinate system (displayed at the bottom of the screen) is UTM grid zone 14 north, the datum is North American Datum of 1983 for the contiguous U.S. and the geoid model is EGM96 (Earth Geoid Model 1996) (see Pathfinder online help or General Reference Manual for more information on coordinate systems). You can select a coordinate system under Options|Coordinate System.

Figure 3. The Coordinate System Window.

The next time you start Pathfinder Office, you can open your project by selecting File|Projects and scrolling down the list of available projects.

  Figure 4. The Select Project Window.

(Note: the Select Project window may open automatically when Pathfinder Office is started).

Once you select your project, its name will be displayed in the current project display window on the project toolbar.

Figure 5. The current project display window
(the project toolbar appears at the top right in Figure 1).